Ben & Franci and co (sort of) in New York City

Glimpses into the last couple of weeks

I don’t know why the weeks go by so fast. I have a bunch of photos to share with you from when Ben’s cousin Sharon visited us a month ago, our trip to Connecticut 2 weeks ago and our trip to visit Jeremy in Philadelphia last weekend. But they’ll have to wait a bit longer.

I’m trying to get the hang of how to organise our days and am hoping to do a ‘day in the life’ sort of post soon too with my thoughts about the value of good routines. I have lots of ideas, but not so much computer time, especially now that Marica has ‘graduated’ from preschool and is now settling into the life of a homeschooler. More on that some other day.

It seems I’m running from one puddle to the next now that Esther has started potty training — I’ve forgotten how messy the initial stages are! Thankfully we have all hard floors.

I also fill the days spending quality time with the newest addition to our family, a Nikon D5000. Ben’s bosses very generously gave me one and I was once again reminded how often I am the recipient of totally undeserved grace. I’ve been having tonnes of fun with it, but it sure is a learning curve! You can definitely take much worse shots with a DSLR than with a point-and-shoot if you don’t know what you’re doing, but when you get it right, boy, it’s about a million times better! I hope that you will benefit from the improved quality of photos (I hope!) on here too. My favourite feature of the camera: being able to focus on something and have everything else blurry (called bokeh). Below, for example, Marica’s face is in focus and the background blurry (even if the lighting is not perfect, but that’s a different topic!).

And here Mr Giraffe is the star of the show.

You can take photos of a sick Marica and a wriggly Esther in your bed.

And Miss Potter on a freshly wiped table.

You can do fun things with feet.

And babies,

and food.

Oh, I love food. And I love taking photos of food.

And I love eating food. That glow, by the way, is not perspiration. It’s just my natural shine.

And while we’re on the topic of food, and if you have read this far, I congratulate you. I would like to announce that Uncrustables is not a staple in our house, thankyouverymuch. I have standards, people! My sense of humour quite obviously does not traverse cyber space very well.

The really big differences between a camera like mine and the D5000 are 1) the sensor size (mine is the size of a pencil eraser, the D5000 is more like a postage stamp), and 2) probably the lens quality (resulting in things like chromatic aberrations at the corners of photos in particular situations, or blurry pictures in dimmer lighting conditions)

My dream camera (within the realms of affordability, that is): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/550D, partly because it has a very cool open-source firmware hack, and partly because it’s still a very high quality camera with a better value-for-money than an equivalent Nikon (Nikons have a better brand rep, and they do produce better high-end cameras, but do have to have the dosh sitting around).

Trying not to be discontented with my camera, now. :) Love the shot of the chocolatey things. And of the girls in your bed. …Off to work on editing some photos of an acquaintance’s children–photos that weren’t terribly great the first time around. (Could have used that bokeh feature and some better lighting.)

Hi Franci, nothing to do with photos (although yours are great) but chairs, namely resin ones. You mentioned when you were visiting that you hadn’t been able to purchase any. Our supermarket has them on sale for $6.99 (usually $8.99). I could buy a bunch and bring them down some time; in fact it would probably hasten a visit from us. Hope all is well in NYC. Warm regards – Judy

Don’t worry, Franci, I think almost everyone understood your humour and just weren’t going to let you get away with it :-) I suspected something like what Laurel said! but thought I would reply ‘in kind’, playing along. And I noticed some Americans were quick to let you know they hadn’t heard of Uncrustables, which tells me they weren’t going to take your ‘dig’ sitting down!